A fresh start!

The code was so messy that it was difficult for us to continue like this. That’s why we decided to refactor the code. It means that we have cleaned a lot of bad and ugly things inside of the application in order to have a cleaner base to work on. A demo is available at the end of this article.

New introduction screen

As you can see in the demo, we have a über cool title screen that appears with an awesome effect. At first, Ben did it as a joke, but since we find it irresistible, we’re going to keep it for the final version.

Home screen

New textures

We have done a little of pixel art with fresh new textures. We have updated the fireball texture using shaded colors to improve it. Now we have a beautiful colored fireball.

New fireball texture

In addition, we designed our first ennemy. Here comes a feared challenger named Blop!

Fear Blop!

And finally, we also made an automatic sentry gun who will cause problems to our happy rabbits.

Sentry Gun

New Sounds

Music and sounds effect were added but the music theme and the sound effect are only samples. We are using what we could find in order to test the code attached to music and sound effects. I hope we will have time to compose a 8bit-like music and sound effects.

Demo

Avatar

This week we have improved the Dialog system by adding avatars. Thanks to this we can show a picture of who is actually speaking. We wanted dialogs to be like old school role playing video game dialogs that’s why we added this feature. Here is an example:

New Avatar System

Every dialog is stored in an xml file. There is also the avatar id in order to know who is speaking.

Xml dialog file

General Fixes

We have made some fixes in the game. Now when the game starts the camera follows the first rabbit.

We have also founded a memory leak in the game that we fixed.

We are currently trying to debug the reloading of the level because it will be usefull to add a “retry” option if the player is stuck.

HUD

The HUD has evolved a bit. We added the avatar of the current Rabbit and we displayed his health (in text) and a image of a heart. We have issues to display the image of the heart. So, for the HUD, the next step is to fix the bug of the image.

Dialog system

In order to inject story elements, we have added a dialog system. This system is linked to a XML file containing every dialog for one level. Here is an example of what it looks like in game :

dialog system

HUD

We have also worked on the HUD, or « Head Up Display ». It is every fixed information at the top of the screen during the game (for example: number of lives left, amount of ammunition, weapon selected, …). The HUD is very important for the player, because it’s his reference during the game, like a dashboard for a driver. In our case, we’ll display the image of the current rabbit and maybe his health points.

the HUD

For now, we only have the display of the number of the rabbit. Next week, we hope we can show you, not a number, but directly the portrait of the current rabbit.

New Tiles

The difficulty about our tiles is that they are in 16×16 pixels. It isn’t much, so we had to do some pixel art. Pixel art isn’t easy, it have its own codes and techniques. At first, we did some ugly tiles that didn’t turn out good. We did some research and found this tutorial. It really helped us to understand some rules to apply. The result is this tile set :

Current tile set

Save system

We have also found how to manage to save the progression of the player while he is playing. To do that, we have added an easy save system thanks to the Flixel framework in which we can save everything we want to. For now we simply save the number of levels achieved. With this save system the player can quit the game and keep his progression.

The Exit Door

We have coded the exit door too ! If every rabbits are near the exit door the level ends. Now we have to manage different levels in order to go to the next level when the player hits the “Next Level” button.

This week, we worked on our game project management. We defined our priorities and what we have to code next. Here is a list of important tasks that we have to take care of, so everyone in the group has to pick something to do:

Write the LevelManager class. A class that manages levels, you might don’t know but right now we load the first level and that’s all. We have to code a manager that loads the given level, some functions like loadNextlevel etc …

Code the exit door. It’s the point where all rabbits have to go to complete the level.

Code the HUD.

Display which rabbit is selected (with his life and type). We can display portraits and highlight the one who is selected.

Dialog system in order to display cut scenes (little dialogs before the level starts).

Manage and create ennemies.

Dame => Remake a demo level, create firsts levels.

Graphic design

Design Tiles

Game Introduction

Design Menus

Save System, see how the Flixel save system works and how we could use it in the game.

We don’t have anything new or really exciting to show right now so please wait until the next week. You will see some new features mentioned above with screenshots and demo.

Hello, since we have exams coming in the following weeks and a lot of projects we are sorry to say that we can’t keep up the good work about our English projet for now.

However we found a game that could inspire us which is called “StealthBastard”. It’s a free platform and puzzle Pc game you can download at http://www.stealthbastard.com/. Feel free to watch the trailer:

This game is full of tricky traps we might reuse in our map design. I don’t think our game will be as great as this one but there a many interesting ideas.

For example, if you touch lasers you die, and it’s a great idea since it’s fun in a platform game to have a real platform challenge. Another example could be the loading bar when you are hacking a device. It’s good because you are really vulnerable to ennemies. You have to have a good timing to avoid beeing killed when you hack a device. Finally, tricky traps will be the funniest part, you have to learn about every fail you do and manage to avoid these traps.

I mean that in every puzzle game there are many blocks that if you touch you die. It’s important to have a certain amount of difficulty.

Hello everyone! I’m Kevin who makes my teammates really need to discuss in English. I’m totally a rookie in making a video game. Everything for me is so new.

In addition, I finally got my internet in my room by which I can download the developing program and search useful information.

So now I’ll introduce the thing I’ve learned for this week. There are three parts in my introduction: Git, Flixel and my teammates’ tutorial(in English of course!)

First of all, is the Github. It’s impossible for everyone work together all the time, so in order to work together on the Internet, we had decided to use a socialcode program called Github. It allows everyone to write the code at the same time and submit it without collision because it would lock the project when anyone is trying to modifying the code. Best of all, we can get the newest version of the code everytime.

Secondly is the Flixel, in my opinion, it’s a package for game writing and it is written in Actionscript.

I think we already have introduced the Flixel in the first week, but just until this week I finally actually use it!

(for the reason that I couldn’t download the Flashdeveloer with the desperately slow public wifi)

I found it is sooooo cool because it’s my first time I write some code for a Flash application. Maybe, it’s hard to work with that from scratch,but thanks to Flixel it is not so complicated.

For example, we can just create a visual world with some simple commands, it helps us to set the gravity, to draw the animation of the character, set the map and counting the score…etc.

I played…no I tested each command in the tutorial which was written on the web already, and I really found how amazing it is.

Last but not least, I really appreciate the tutorial of my genius teammates. In fact, without the tutorial, I wouldn’t have finished the work I did this week. Honestly it is the best English textbook I’ve ever seen in my life! They told me step by step how to install and set the environment to synchronize the code. Thanks a lot!

Pause Menu

This week we worked on the structure of the game and not on the gameplay.

We added some Menus :

The startup screen : It allows to choose when we start the game and opportunity is given to the player to go into the section “settings” or “credits”. Actually this screen can only start the game, we can’t access to the section “settings” or “credits”. We are working on adding buttons to access “credits”.

The pause menu : This menu can give the power to stop the game and resume it when the player wants to. This menu is also in development, the pause is possible by pressing the “escape” key or “p” but the screen that appears is not finished yet.

We have some problems for the development because the framework Flixel evolves all the time and the tutorials we can find on the web aren’t adapted to our version of Flixel (the last released).

Storyboard

This week we had a lot of projects to work on so we didn’t have so much time to dedicate to the English project (sorry). Hope we will be able to work on the storyboard for the next week, maybe begin to draw the introduction of the game. It would be great! =]

DAME, software level editor

This week we made a new demo using DAME software. DAME is a simple way to create maps with a tile system. It’s very commonly used with Flixel in order to create levels easily with a graphical user interface. You can see the new demo and see that we managed to manipulate this software. However we have to add the rabbit switch system but it won’t be long.

GIT repository

In addition, we have decided to use a versioning application in order to code easily together. Our code is now opensource and available on Github. Here you will be able to see every modification we applied to the code. Also, it is easier for us to code all together and to send modifications to github using the git software. It allows us to easily monitor versions of our program and keep track of every version.

Beginning of the storyboard

We also have tried to create a storyboard for the introduction of our story. We decided to realize a slideshow of drawings to explain the situation to the player. We have to make sure that the player understands the story before he plays. We showed the slideshow to our friends who are not part of the project to see what they understand. For now, the beginning is understandable: the rabbits are living peacefully when suddenly they are abducted by a mystical force. Other animals have also been abducted. They have to clear tests and … After that, they don’t quite understand. This is still a work in progress.